But my favourite so far has got to be the one launched yesterday by Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It’s called Green GB Week.

To get an idea what an amazing job it has done to revitalise the Conservative base, here are some of the comments below a piece Clark published in the former shires Tory journal the Daily Telegraph, headlined “It’s time to reap the benefits of a low carbon economy”.

Some ghastly National Health Service bureaucrat wants to change the recipe of Cornish pasties so that they are less Cornish, less pasty-like, and more ‘healthy’.
Well of course she does. It’s what public health officials do.

The bureaucrat, called Jill Venables, was speaking at a conference of Public Health England, the ghastly, finger-wagging quango established by David Cameron’s pretend-Conservative government in one of its many fits of pettifogging Nanny Statism.

Ms Venables told the Public Health England conference that some hospital visitors eat three Cornish pasties a day.

While acknowledging there is “nothing evil” about a traditional pasty, which can comprise up to 800 calories, she said she wanted to “save patients’ lives, which is why we are focusing on therapeutic diets”.

Britain has been celebrating the 70th birthday of the National Health Service (NHS) with services in Westminster Abbey, a specially commissioned symphony, eulogies from government ministers, and endless hagiographies on the BBC.

All that was missing was a May-Day-style parade down the Mall featuring T72s, Katyusha rockets, missile launchers, red flags, and Owen Jones leading the goose-stepping marchers of the Red Army Choir.

This isn’t about health and it never was about health. This is about left-wing triumphalism.

If the NHS was really about making people better it would never have been set up the way it was and would certainly have been dismantled many years ago. No, the NHS is just a life support machine for preserving the long discredited Soviet-era ideology of state control, enforced egalitarianism, communal misery.

The sooner that life support machine is turned off, the sooner the rest of us stand a chance of making a swift recovery from this 70-year-old horror show.

Sure there are many other good reasons why the NHS must die: that it kills thousands of its patients, leaves many thousands more in abject squalor and misery, wastes stupendous quantities of money, breeds inefficiency, covers up negligence and incompetence, and has some of the worst outcomes for serious health conditions anywhere in the civilised world.

I’d particularly recommend his book to any parent keen to deprogramme their Corbynista offspring (image: Getty)

Next time there’s a terrorist atrocity in Britain, here’s one of the things that will happen in the immediate aftermath: the mob will look for a scapegoat, someone wholly innocent of the actual crime but who must nonetheless bear the burden of its impotent rage.

Perhaps it will be a politician, usually Nigel Farage, though sometimes Donald Trump. More likely it will be Katie Hopkins or Tommy Robinson. They’ll say something robust and honest, most likely on Twitter. And instead of congratulating them on their courage in telling it like it is, the twitchfork mob will furiously brandish them as its Exhibit A — the hatemonger who created the atmosphere which made this terrible act possible. Meanwhile, the true perpetrators — at least in terms of moral responsibility — will be permitted to get off scot-free.

Quite why people behave this way, I find mystifying. But, as Ben Irvine describes in his fascinating book ScapegoatedCapitalism, we’ve been doing it in different forms since time immemorial.

There is still much dispute as to precisely what it was that persuaded 17.4 million Britons to vote for Brexit last year. Some may have done it to regain Britain’s sovereignty, some to curb immigration, some because they realised correctly that everyone on the Remain side of the argument from one-hit-wonder gobshite Bob Geldof to that preening renter of overpriced desert islands Richard Branson was a weapons-grade, copper-bottomed tick.

But here’s one thing of which we can be pretty sure: nobody voted Brexit – the biggest public vote in favour of anything in UK history – in order to get more of the same old, same old.

Brexit was, perhaps more than anything, a cri de coeur from the silent majority who had been ignored for too long. It sprung from the same impulse that saw Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency – what political economist (and friend to the Donald) Ted Malloch has argued is a paradigm shift in global politics.

If you had to sum up that impulse in a phrase, it would go something like “Enough of this shit, already.”

Sure we might differ on our preferred solutions, but we’re all agreed what the general problem is. For too long a remote, democratically unaccountable, smug, corrupt, self-serving liberal elite has been making all the rules and all the running, while the rest of us just feel poorer, less fairly treated and more constrained by stupid, politically correct rules, regulations, and taxes in a failing system which wastes lots of our money yet gives us little in return.

The good news is that, against the odds, we won Brexit.

The bad news is that in Britain we’ve still ended up with the same old, same old bunch of tossers at the top.

In the immediate aftermath of the extraordinary palace coup in July last year, where the losing faction of the Conservative party who’d voted Remain somehow managed to slime their way into all the key positions of government – Remainer Theresa May as Prime Minister, Remainer Philip Hammond as Chancellor, Remainer Amber Rudd as Home Secretary – I dashed off a despairing piece called “Brexit won the battle: But now we’ve lost the war.”

Later I wondered whether I’d gone slightly over the top. (Something, as you know, I’m always careful to avoid.) After all, Theresa May seemed to be making all the right noises – “Brexit means Brexit” and so on.

But after yesterday’s budget, I’m disappointed to learn that I was right all along…

My NHS experience, with a life-threatening problem, was an encouraging one – apart from the other patients.

There’s some journalistic research you’d really never do by choice. Spending four days in an NHS hospital with a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, for example.

Unfortunately it was out of my hands. I fell off a horse, one thing led to another, and suddenly there I was, lying in what I imagine is a reasonably typical NHS ward being tended by all those multi-ethnic nurses and hard-pressed doctors you read about in the newspapers but rarely encounter yourself because in order to do so you have to be quite seriously ill.

So: what have I learned?

First, that it’s not as bad as you’ve long feared, especially not for anyone hardened by the experience of the military, prison or — in my own case — being at an English prep school in the 1970s. Yes, it’s all a bit spartan, but the staff from the porters and cleaners to the consultants were a delight, and I grew very fond of my multinational assortment of nurses from Poland, Zimbabwe, Portugal, Ghana and south India, who couldn’t have been harder-working, jollier, more competent or more caring.

Also, the routine and the retro ambiance can become weirdly seductive: the morning clean-up team who’ll either shave and wash you in bed or give you the towels and shower gel to do it yourself (NHS razors are horribly blunt, though); the jolly dinner-lady type who comes round and round with tea, forgetting every time that you don’t take sugar; the endless blood-pressure and temperature checks; the dispensation of your medicines in those little plastic cups; the school food; the hideous but oh-so-practical, one-size-fits-all pyjamas. If you were healthy you’d be appalled by everything: the noise, the light, the smell, the Soviet basicness. But when you’re ill, there’s almost nowhere you’d rather be and you feel in very safe hands.

That’s the good side. Now the bad — and it’s so bad I’m surprised it isn’t more of a national scandal. We read a lot about a service stretched to breaking point but what few of us grasp — I didn’t until I saw it myself — is perhaps the main contributory factor to this: bed after bed occupied by elderly, often Alzheimer’s-afflicted patients who simply don’t belong in wards designed to treat acute, short-term conditions.

I don’t mean to be heartless here. Clearly we need to find some way of ensuring that our elderly, especially those with no family to care for them, live out their twilight years free from misery and discomfort. But the place for these people is a dedicated home run by carers, not an expensive-to-run NHS ward with highly trained staff and valuable equipment designed primarily for emergencies.

A pulmonary embolism isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you but it’s pretty bad. On my first night, as I lay wracked with pain that sometimes penetrated even my morphine delirium, I could not but be conscious of the skeletal, rambling old geezer opposite me spraying his entire bed area in explosive diarrhoea.

Nigel Farage says that nurses working for the NHS should be able to speak English. I agree. What a pity that this is about the most daringly controversial criticism of the NHS we’re likely to hear from almost any politician, of whatever political hue, in the run up to the General Election.

That’s because, though the Conservatives, Labour, UKIP, the Greens and the Lib Dems hold widely divergent views on many of the key issues – from taxation to welfare to defence to education – there is one topic on which they are all in full agreement: the NHS, gawd bless it, is the envy of the world and must be preserved at all costs. Why, as Danny Boyle reminded us at the London Olympics opening ceremony, it’s an achievement far greater than the Industrial Revolution.

And as David Cameron keeps telling us, it’s Our NHS – like a beloved old family pet only much more useful because your cat can’t cure you of cancer or treat you to heart triple by-pass surgery or a gastric band operation if you’re morbidly obese, nor does your dog wait patiently behind a desk in the doctor’s surgery to explain, no actually, it’s no good prescribing you antibiotics for that nasty cold you’ve got because a cold is a viral infection not an bacterial one, but no worries, I’m not charging you for this asinine waste of my time and taxpayers’ money because that’s what we’re here for, we’re this endless source of bounteous freeness…

It’s a brave person indeed who would dispute this rose-tinted assessment of our cherished National Treasure. And for a politician to say so – even one as outspoken as Nigel Farage – it would more or less amount to career suicide.

Don’t you think this state of affairs is rather sinister? I do. It reminds me of that awful period after the death of Princess Diana when, for weeks, you weren’t allowed to say that the national outpouring of untrammelled mawkishness was possibly a bit un-British and overdone. Or, worse, of those standing ovations that you had to give Stalin which went on for hours because the first one to stop clapping feared being taken away and shot.

And there’s one more thing it reminds me of – something I’ve been writing about for quite some time now, so I know whereof I speak. This sacrosanct status the NHS has acquired, where you can’t venture any kind of criticism, no matter how reasonable, for fear – at best – of being told what an awful person you are, and – at worst – of having your reputation publicly trashed and your career destroyed. It’s so painfully redolent of the Establishment omerta about another of the great religions of our time. The Global Warming religion.

My fellow Evil Climate Change Denier (TM) Andrew Montford has noticed the similarities too, in this post at his Bishop Hill site. It’s titled Why Do Good Intentions In The Public Sector Lead To Evil? – which is a question I could have answered by referring him to an aphorism of Christopher Booker’s.

“Evil men don’t get up in the morning saying ‘I’m going to do evil!’. They say: “I’m going to make the world a better place.”

This, of course, is why those working within the NHS have apparently so little compunction about destroying those within their ranks, however eminent and decent, who are not “with the programme.”

For chapter and verse on what happened to one senior NHS practitioner – cancer surgeon Joseph Meirion Thomas – who spoke out, I do recommend you read this excellent article in The Spectator by Freddy Gray.

Meirion Thomas was not afraid to point out numerous problems with the NHS in sundry articles, among them: that the NHS’s overstretched budget is being eroded by “health tourists” from abroad claiming services to which they are not entitled and for which they do not pay; that the politically correct obsession with gender equality is promoting too many female doctors who aren’t pulling their weight; that GPs are an anachronism.

The people must be allowed to have their cake and eat it or they’ll sulk…..

There are lots of things that puzzle me about the ‘enlightened’ thinking behind this new measure. Like:

Is it really the State’s job to decide on our behalf that families in which children reared by two parents of the same sex are now every bit as socially desirable as those with the more traditional female mother and male father arrangement?

Who made this new rule and how come we got no say in the matter?

Given that the National Health Service is effectively bankrupt isn’t it a bit of a decadent luxury to strain the creaking system still further by diverting scarce resources that could have gone towards say, cancer care, on an area of “medicine” that has rather more to do with lifestyle choice than it does with urgent clinical necessity?

July 21, 2011

HAVE you heard about the amazing bread the NHS hands out on prescription to gluten allergy sufferers in Wales?

Gluten free: But this bread is very expensive whichever way you slice it.

It’s made of fairy-dust-sprinkled hypoallergenic wheat harvested by pixies at dawn, hand-ground by hedge-fund managers and then baked to perfection by Parisian masterchefs in ovens made of pure gold!

Well that’s one explanation for the £984,185 the NHS in Wales (where prescriptions are free) blew last year buying 47,684 gluten-free loaves at £20.64 a pop when, in a supermarket, you can get them for a 10th of the price. The other is more prosaic…

2 thoughts on “Who would spend so much on a loaf? The NHS, of course.”

If gluten is the problem for those individuals, as it is for about 5% of the Irish gene pool, then it’s time for those ‘sufferers’ to revert back to the diet of their ancestors, whose wheat avoidance led to their celiac condition in the first place. And since it is an ancestral left over, they cannot, or should not, claim it as a birth right to eat the foods of other tribes, or as in this instance, the expensive simulation of ‘other’ food.

“This claim is inaccurate. The actual cost for the single loaf of gluten-free bread in question is around £2.82, not the £ 32 claimed. The £32 cost quoted is for an average prescription on which several loaves are ordered at a time.

“If a GP determines a patient requires these products, they should be prescribed to maintain their health. It is wrong to question the judgement and professionalism of health professionals – who have best interests at heart in determining what is prescribed. It is important to note that the loaves ordered from pharmacies are often not of the type routinely available in supermarkets.”

Notes
Loaf of bread
Over the last 12 months there were 27 prescriptions issued for the gluten free bread quoted as costing £32 per loaf. On the 27 prescriptions, the total amount of the bread prescribed was 123,600 grams. Each loaf is 400 grams. Therefore, 309 loaves were prescribed for £ 871.36 ie £2.82 per 400 gram loaf…

Frank Field’s piece in today’s Telegraph about the difficulties facing the next British government is well worth reading. He outlines, more lucidly and – ahem – frankly than any other politician I have read just how royally screwed our economy is; and how drastically any incoming administration is going to have to cut public spending if it is to repair our finances.

He cites the shocking figure from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that the recession “has wiped out nearly five per cent of our total wealth.” This, he depressingly explains, “means the country is permanently poorer, and will take well over a parliament just to restore its lost wealth.”

Then he tells us why this recession is unique:

“In all previous recoveries, tax revenues have been quickly restored. Not so this time. The Government admits that, even with the economy growing once again, there will still be a gap of £80 billion in 2013 between revenue and spending.”

He goes on to explain why the Brown/Darling quantitative easing programme is merely putting off the hour of reckoning when Britain faces bankruptcy:

“Britain is borrowing proportionately more than any other major economy, and lenders have a galaxy of countries from which to choose. When the Government is unable to print any more new money to buy its own debt, the market will insist on higher long-term interest rates. This will not only make it more difficult to sustain an economic recovery, but it will increase the cost of servicing this debt.”

Finally, he comes up with two very useful ways an incoming administration can rein in public spending.

First, through pensions reform:

“A truly reforming government could set itself the task of abolishing pension poverty by building up a compulsory funded scheme around the current pay-as-you-go state pension. It would mean that today’s workers would have to put more of their pay into savings, but they would own their own assets, and gain a guarantee that no one would retire into poverty.

“Such a reform would see the current £15 billion spent on means-testing for pensioners fall to almost nothing over the decades. Simultaneously, the Government should announce that its only goal in pensions was to secure that decent minimum for everyone, phasing out over a similar period the almost £40 billion taxpayers currently spend each year on subsidising pension savings.”

And second, by slicing several juicy steaks from David Cameron’s most sacred cow, the NHS:

“A similarly radical approach must be imposed on the NHS. While productivity has improved by 23 per cent in the private sector over the past decade, in the public sector it has actually fallen. If the same productivity improvements had been delivered by the NHS, for example, the exact same level of service could have been bought for £26 billion less.

“The radical alternative to an across-the-board cut in NHS services is to insist on the productivity increases that have already been delivered across the private sector. Labour has in the past been almost exclusively concerned about how much money is going into a service. The new politics will focus exclusively on outputs.”

You’ll be reading all this and nodding your head and going: “Oughtn’t all this to be bloody obvious?” And you’re dead right. Nothing Frank Field says in the piece is exactly new or original. But what’s such a breath of fresh air – and why so many of us on both sides of the political divide so love the man – is its clarity, directness and freedom from cant.

Frank Field, let us not forget, is a Labour MP. Yet he has managed to articulate truths which seem to be quite beyond the expressive powers of anyone in Cameron’s Conservative party.

“Bribing voters with their own money is no longer an option,” he says.

Yes, exactly! But how many times have you ever heard any of Cameron’s lot try to articulate the moral and intellectual case against tax and spend?

Seldom, I’m sure. Probably never, because anyone who tried to do so would be quickly gagged under Cameron’s “Don’t say anything that makes us sound like remotely like Tories,” policy.

Yes, sure, both Cameron and Osborne have been dropping one or two hints of late about the necessarily tough fiscal measures they’re going to have to adopt on getting into power; on the amount of hurt they’re going to have to inflict on the electorate.

But what they’ve signally failed to do is indicate they’ve remotely understood the scale of the problem. (If they did, they wouldn’t be talking about ring-fencing spending on the NHS).

Nor does it appear to have occurred to them that, though a cut in public spending could initially be a painful thing, it could also have the most enormous side benefits – not just in restoring public finances but also in freeing citizens from the shackles of the overweening state.

Looking at the list in the papers the other day of some of Cameron’s bright new Conservatives to watch out for, my heart sank, as it so often does these days when contemplating our future leaders.

“You lot,” I thought to myself (and I’ve known some of them personally since Oxford) “Do not have an effing clue. You’re still of the mindset which thinks the most dramatic problems facing the Tory party are things like its stance on homosexuality and green issues.” But the public has moved on; so has the economy. I despair, I really do.